Cherished Memories of Africa — Page 217
199 tree and some residents of the village joined us. I told my companions, ‘twenty years earlier, myself and Ahmad Ly made a very arduous trip to this village with the message of Ahmadiyyat and nobody accepted it. However, we did not despair and now the Creator and the Master has opened the hearts of this area for us. Therefore, we prostrate to Him in gratitude at the same spot in the same village that we visited twenty years ago. ’ All the audience and the gentry were greatly impressed. Service to Humanity Once Maulana Daud Hanif Sahib and I were on Tabligh and tarbiyyat tour of the Kaolack jama’ats in Senegal. Those days, passing time during the day was not all that difficult because one was busy travelling, meeting the people and conducting various programmes. Thus one hardly noticed the day pass by. However, going through the night was a difficult proposition. Those days jama’ats in Senegal were very few. Moreover, most of the Ahmadi brothers were in villages; they belonged to Fulani tribe who herded cattle and did a bit of farming. Their houses were not even made of mud but made of grass and reed only that were just large enough to house their families only. They had no concept of proper bedstead; they just put some wood pieces together to form a bed and filled sacks of cloth with grass to use as mattresses. In early days, the murabbis also used the same mattresses. We travelled for several days continuously. We spent our nights sleeping on the prayer mats in somebody’s courtyard sometimes and in our car at other times. One night, we had a meeting in Plado – a village near Kaolack, after isha that finished after